Commercial jigsaw puzzle sets are designed to reproduce only a single target picture of non-abstract subject matter. Although a user can pre-order a set with a user selected target picture, assembly is still restricted to only that single target picture, which limits the user's potential enjoyment and satisfaction. Such jigsaw puzzles are frequently only assembled once and then framed in their assembled state or discarded.
Notwithstanding, it has been proposed, for example in U.S. Pat. No. 6,137,498 to Silvers to arrange together many small photographs from an apparently unlimited store, as source images, to form a recognizable semblance of a large target image, by similarly comparing, automatically, brightness and color of disjoint sub-areas/sub-regions of each small tile image with corresponding sub-areas/sub-regions into which the larger target picture is partitioned. However, as almost one hundred photographs are required as source images, each of which is divided into more than two hundred sub-regions for a 1:1 comparison with corresponding sub-regions of the target image, a relatively long processing time is required to obtain a satisfactory match.
Such approach may, therefore, be inherently unsuited to a commercial situation where a large numbers of users are simultaneously uploading user selected target picture images on line, for example, even pictures taken on their cell phones, and are impatiently, waiting for a mosaic copy, even while still on line.
In addition, only the one picture can be made with the limited number of images that have been selected and matched to that picture. The set of images selected for that one picture cannot be re-used to make a recognizable semblance of another picture. It would be necessary to select/substitute other source pictures from the apparently unlimited store.
Furthermore, the prior patent is not suggestive of any user intervention to assemble the source images even when matched to the target picture, the source images being merely presented as unlimited stored digital images, not as a predetermined limited number of mechanical tiles/pieces, as required with a mosaic or jigsaw puzzle set sold to a user and, does not provide any instructions or adaptation for any such user assembly.